Last night our raid team made a Three Stooges comedy look like a PBS documentary in comparison. We — and I include myself in that — stunk. It was just a really bad night, one of those nights most guilds have from time to time, but it was tortuous.

Ever since we completed our heroic progression, we have routinely been clearing Antorus in something a little over two hours on our regular Tuesday raid nights. We know the fights, we all know our jobs for each one, and we have all gotten some decent gear which also helps. But not last night. We probably should have just called it when we carelessly wiped on the first boss, Garothi. Garothi! Just an aberration, we said, we were a bit short on healers, we said, a couple of our regular players were not there yet, we said. Pffft, no worries. Similarly, we overlooked problems with the next few bosses — sure, execution was a little rough, but hey we killed them so no harm no foul.

Then we got to Varimathras and wiped repeatedly. Varimathras, the Patchwerk boss of Legion! To be fair, a large part of the problem was Blizz’s extremely piss-poor raid design, in which Coven is visible (and at time inadvertently targetable) through the hole in the ceiling. In the past, we have had a little problem with this, but it has not usually been a big deal. But last night several times a wayward Sidewinder shot from one of our MM hunters went into heat seeking mode, targeted one of the Coven, and then transported the hunter up into the Coven area, causing a cascading set of damage that wiped the raid. Individually, the glitch was kind of funny, but when it happened repeatedly it just compounded our already high level of frustration.

Design stupidity aside, though, even when Coven did not gang up on us, we were bad at the mechanics. After many frustrating wipes, we finally gave up and decided to just go to Aggramar and Argus and be done with the torture.

HAHAHAHAHA! Aggramar, too, was a comedy of errors for us. Our dps was down, small adds kept getting their cc broken out of turn, people died to fire and other easy mechanics…. the list goes on. Finally our usual raid leader got home from work and logged in, and we killed the boss by the hair of our chinny chin chins. Argus was not as horrible, and we did one shot him, though it was not our most elegant performance. A couple of people wanted to go back and get Varimathras, but as soon as Argus was down people bailed as fast as they could. (I was one of them, even though Varimathras is one of the very few bosses that have loot useful to me. I, along with most others, had had enough.)

I don’t have an explanation for why we were so bad last night. It is true we were missing a couple of our usual top damage dealers, but most of our problems did not stem from lower dps. The glitch with Varimathras and Coven was bad, but it was not the cause of our wiping every time on that boss. People — myself included — just were kind of sloppy, and it had an effect. I know for myself I am pretty much done with Legion in terms of being excited about anything, and I feel burned out on Antorus. The only reason for me to run heroic at all any more is to help some of our guild non-raiders get their AotC. I am happy to do this, but curiously very few have expressed any interest in getting the achievement. The GM put out an announcement that anyone wanting to get it should contact an officer, and we would carry a couple of people each week. I don’t think more than one responded. I think quite a few players, raiders or not, are feeling expansion burnout.

One other thing happened last night that had an effect on me, and possibly on some others. We have a guildie who rarely logs on after maybe the first couple of months in a new expansion. (I will refer to this person as “they” so as not to categorize them, even though it will result in very tortured grammar, which I apologize for in advance.) This person is the Significant Other of another guildie, and they are not especially interested in the game but they play once in a while, apparently to please their SO. Interestingly, they seem to play only when the guild is doing something that will result in loot or a mount for them, and as soon as the guild has enabled them to get the thing, they disappear for weeks or months, uninterested in helping anyone else get the thing. (Also, whenever they do decide to play, their SO is always begging for loot for them — “Do you need that tier piece? [Name of SO] could really use it.”) To each their own, I suppose. They are not a bad player, and they are pleasant to chat with, but they clearly are out only for themself.

So last night when this person showed up for raid, I assumed they wanted to get the AotC achievement. Maybe they did, or maybe they just wanted the mount from Argus, but it turned out they also wanted something else. About halfway through the raid it came out that this person was streaming it. It seems they are trying to establish themself as a popular streamer, and apparently they thought streaming a raid would give them a good platform to add a few more followers. This may or may not be an effective strategy, but I — and a couple of others in the raid — felt duped and used.

It would just seem to be common courtesy to ask the raid before it started if it would be okay to stream it. I have not watched the stream, and I do not intend to, so I do not know what options the person has in place. I assume they do not have name plates visible, and possibly they have music playing that more or less keeps raider verbal comments from coming though clearly. I have no idea if raid chat is visible in the stream. I also do not know if the person streams under their character name, and I do not know if anyone watching would figure out which guild was performing so abominably. It does seem kind of low to stream a raid on a night when everything is going wrong.

Still, all other considerations aside, there is something very unsettling about someone using the raid for their own personal gain, about someone assuming they can just capitalize on my game play for their own advancement. I don’t know if I would have played differently or made different comments if I had known up front about the streaming, but it is the principle. And now that I think about it, I am not sure I would have participated in the raid at all had I known about the streaming in advance. I am not a public person, I have spent most of my life actively avoiding publicity of any kind. That aversion to being in the public eye transfers even to virtual avatars, and I am decidedly not comfortable with someone putting my game play out for public comment regardless of how many or few followers they may have.

Like I said, one of those nights. I am glad it is finally in the rear view mirror.

Last night we ran through Heroic Antorus, clearing it in under 3 hours. It’s fair to say we now have it on farm, although I am not sure what anyone is really farming for any more. Before we finished Argus, the RL mentioned maybe if we had time we might take a run at Mythic Garothi. That, of course, was the signal for several people to immediately drop group and log off the minute we finished Argus. It is true we are not a mythic raiding guild, but we are certainly capable of finishing off a couple of the earlier bosses on that level every tier. I find it challenging and fun, because there really is no pressure to do any sort of heavy progression — we get as far as we can get, and when it gets too punishing we stop. Unfortunately, we do not have 19 other people who feel the same way, so even though we had 22 finish last night’s raid with an hour left in our usual raid time, at least 10 bailed immediately.

About the only thing I am still interested in getting from the raid are my final two tokens to finish upgrading my hunter Pantheon trinket. We have had only one legendary version drop from Argus, in what amounts to maybe 300 kills (20 people average, maybe total of 15 normal/heroic kills), and honestly I don’t see it as much of an improvement for me once I get mine to ilevel 1000. I am not even sure how useful the raid-wide proc is for us, as some people who have the specialized trinket for healing or dps or whatnot do not wear theirs during raid because their other trinkets sim higher for them. So I guess we could be getting more frequent procs if more people wore theirs, but that doesn’t happen.

Overall, I think the whole Pantheon trinket mechanism is poorly conceived. It seems like it was designed solely for high end raiding guilds, and even then the fact that there is zero control over the proc just blows. If a team really works to get their raiders the trinkets and upgrades, they should absolutely be able to control when to trigger the buff. Then again, possibly Blizz knew that this raid tier was going to be pretty mediocre, and doling out trinket upgrades was all they could think of to keep a few guilds going back.

My own performance in our raids seems to be regressing, and I am in kind of a funk about it. I don’t run a damage meter during actual raids, but I do look at my logs afterwards to see where I can improve. Everyone can have an off night, of course, but I have been having an off night now for about 3 weeks. My damage numbers (both totals and dps) are just not improving.

I am not so self-serving as to put it off on gear. I have a relatively high ilevel (around 962 equipped). I really cannot use that as an excuse. However, I am struggling with secondary stats — just cannot get seem to amass the crit I need for my zoo build. I have equipped the highest-crit items I have, and I gem and enchant for it, but it remains pretty pitiful. Meanwhile, my mastery soars to well over 100%, and I end up with what seems like far too much versatility. With so much mastery, I tried a Dire Frenzy build for a while, but there was little improvement that I could see, and it was a dead boring rotation, so I switched back.

The insanely high impact secondary stats have on each spec, combined with the randomness of their presence in gear, is in my opinion one of the worst things Blizz has foisted on us. (And don’t even get me started on gear specialized for a certain spec, such as tier gear, having large amounts of what is arguably the worst possible stat for that spec.) I almost hate getting new gear these days, because it is impossible to tell at a glance whether or not it will be an upgrade, or if it might become an upgrade with a different talent build or different legendaries or different sets of tier gear.

Still, I can’t chalk up my poor performance to gear. That is a cop out.

One thing, I think, is that BM hunters, with our mobility, do well early in a new raid tier. But as the tier goes on, other damage dealers — melee, casters, and even MM hunters — learn the fights and learn where they can stand and when to move to optimize their performance. But other than mashing buttons more efficiently, BM hunters have nothing really to optimize, so even if we don’t actually get worse, everyone else is getting better.

It is true that excellent BM hunters can compete with the best damage dealers. We have one in our guild, and I am in awe of her amazing performance in nearly every fight. (Even so, she is rarely if ever the top damage dealer.) I, however, am only slightly above average even on my best days, and I think that average BM hunters fare rather badly in Legion. Worse than, say, average affliction warlocks or average almost any other class/spec.

(However, none of that is an excuse for doing things like accidentally disengaging off the Kin’garoth platform during a fight. Twice. Or for getting trapped in fire on the far side of the Aggramar platform. That was just inattention and stupidity last night, and I am embarrassed about it.)

Legion is the first expansion where I have not gotten better as the expansion went on. Better gear, higher proficiency with my rotation, more familiarity with the boss fights, more attention to mechanics — no matter how hard I work on those things, and I do work on them — I am losing ground. It is demoralizing.

So, yeah, I am in a definite slump. Whether it is strictly a personal one or one engineered by Blizz’s inability to scale and balance BM hunters, it just feels bad.

Today feels like kind of a disconnected day — we have a few flakes of snow, so of course most things in Northern Virginia come to a screeching halt. It is both amusing and annoying, since it inevitably entails rescheduling, postponing, cancelling, etc. So while my brain is multi-tasking those things in the background, here are a few scattered thoughts on WoW.

Addendum to my manners post. One other “rude clod” type that annoys me in the game is the raid slacker. I am not talking about actual raid performance, but rather the person who is chronically unprepared. You all know such a person. They always want to “borrow” flasks or talent books. They forget to update DBM. They never remember to get their seals before raid so have to go back for them and then demand to be summoned back to the raid. Even in progression, they are chronically short of Defiled Augment Runes, and they have never troubled themselves to get the permanent one from the Army of the Light.

If the raid usually provides feasts, they never ever contribute anything towards making them, and in fact frequently complain bitterly if a feast is not immediately set down, saying rude things like “Feed me” or “Where’s the feast?”. Same with repair mechanisms such as hammers.

On our progression team, we usually provide everyone with a weekly vantus rune to be used for the toughest boss of the week. But once we have the heroic raid on farm we stop doing that. Last tier, after we had downed KJ a few times, the GM announced that we would start doing the boss without handing out vantus runes. Our usual slackers were incensed when a few people used their own, claiming the GM had said we were not to use them. When someone explained that no, only the free ones would not be handed out, there was slacker indignation and piteous cries of “But I don’t have any gold, I’m poooooor!”

So yeah. Ill-mannered clods abound.

Patch 7.3.5. I have not actually done much yet with the new patch. By the time the servers came back up yesterday, it was already past our raid start time, so we all hurriedly logged in and started raiding. I did not do the new quest line or try out any of the old world zone changes.

New zone levels. I am still on the fence about the zone changes. I see why many players would be happy that they can now quest in a favorite zone for much longer and not be penalized in leveling. But beyond that, I think Blizz has pulled a fast one on us. Basically, by increasing the amount of xp needed to level in these zones, and by increasing the health and hit points for mobs as well as for instance and raid bosses in these zones, Blizz has stretched out the amount of time necessary to level a new character or to farm old content for mounts and transmog.

It’s all about the MAU, baby.

I do not know about you, but I actually liked being able to roflstomp through a zone with a new character. I have done nearly every quest so many times that they no longer offer any real entertainment value to me, they are just a means to get passingly familiar with a new class, and to get that new class or alt to a decently high level where the actual fun starts. The faster I can get through them, the better.

As far as I know, Blizz has not improved the mess of low-character spells and abilities, either. A couple of expansions ago, they changed the way/rate at which characters get certain key abilities, and the result for many classes is that you are stuck with one or two useful buttons for a pretty long time. This was annoying but not terrible when all the mobs died quickly and when you could rapidly level up and get a few more abilities. We will see how it plays out now that you cannot level as rapidly and the mobs are more deadly.

Also, if I am farming old raids or instances for a mount or some special transmog or old recipe, I couldn’t care less about “the experience” — I am interested in getting through the thing as fast as possible so that I can be disappointed again and quickly move on.

Basically, I feel like Blizz is testing out techniques for vanilla servers, and they are pretty much shoving “the classic experience” down our throats. And they are ensuring no one can rush through leveling allied characters when they become available, thus stretching out the inevitable end-of-expansion thin content.

Not to mention, if these changes annoy enough people, Blizz’s sales of character boosts will skyrocket. What’s not to love?

”More” bag space. What a scam this is. Ion Hazzikostas had the chutzpah to really hype this at Blizzcon — better sit down, here’s a big announcement: We are giving you more bag space, whoopee, just like you have been asking for!!

It’s four lousy bag spaces, for crying out loud. It doesn’t even begin to make up for the ton of gear and “things” Blizz now makes us carry around.

And if no one noticed, it comes at a price. Not only do you have to add an authenticator to your account (not a bad idea even if you do not get extra space), but you must also subscribe to Blizzard SMS Protect. Thus Blizzard gets a ton of very valuable phone numbers for the paltry expense of a small amount of server storage.

Blizz may have lost a step in game creativity, but they are making up for it in marketing genius.

Ulduar timewalking. Meh. I suppose I will run it once when my guild does it, but I was never very excited about this raid even when it was current. It was too long then and I am certain it will be tedious in its reincarnation. The only fight I thought was interesting was the first one just because of the vehicles (although I rarely got one of the motorcycles, the coolest vehicle….).

Once again, the people clamoring for this, I suspect, will not really love it — their nostalgia for Ulduar almost certainly stems from circumstances other than the raid itself.

Coven revisited. We took a few more shots at Coven last night in raid. Interestingly, we got Army of Norgannon as the first set of adds every time, even though the other add sequences remained random. It could have been a fluke, but it is possible this is an unannounced nerf. It is undeniably easier to get Norgannon out of the way very early, before the really uncontrollable mechanics kick in.

We had gotten a late start on the raid due to the server outage, and we cleared all the bosses up to Coven, so we only got a few pulls (maybe half a dozen) before we called it for the night. People were having a lot of lag issues, and even some weird bugs such as falling through the floor to the boss below Coven. Even so, our last pull — frustratingly — we got the boss down to less than 1% before wiping. Pretty sure we will get past this one Thursday.

Last night our guild took another stab at Heroic Coven of Shivarra in Antorus the Burning Throne. It was our second venture into it, and we were unsuccessful. It’s not like we have run up against a brick wall or anything on this boss — think we only have something like 25-30 Heroic wipes so far. And I suspect we will kill it next week. But there is something about this fight that just feels wrong — a frustrating powerlessness that makes it more akin to a game of chance than the kind of tough boss fight Blizz used to design.

For those who have not been on the raid, Coven is a council-type boss fight, with three bosses that switch out so that you fight any two of them at once. At intervals, various types of large adds appear around the room. The adds are quite powerful, and failure to deal properly with them will wipe the raid, as will failure to deal with the various continuous damage powers of the bosses. At any given time, the raid is dealing with 3-4 or more simultaneous mechanics, and it can get quite hectic.

This in itself is not bad — kind of standard fare in modern raids. What strikes me as different about this raid is the extent to which raid composition and pure luck play a role in success. Yeah, I know there have been other tiers where certain boss kills were somewhat dependent on luck, but Coven seems to be in a class all its own for its dependence on these factors. Two examples:

Location of safe spots during the storm AoE. This AoE will kill you unless you are standing in one of several randomly-located safe spots for the duration. If most or all of these safe spots spawn on top of other one-shot mechanics, the raid will wipe. And this happens regularly.

Order of adds. Certain types of adds are much more difficult (ok, almost impossible) to survive if they spawn at certain points in the fight (Norgannon adds during Storm, for example, or during the targeted freeze mechanic or during the mass-slow mechanic). There are only four types of adds, so the chances of drawing a raid-wiping combo of them are pretty high.

The above are the major RNG factors, but there are a ton of minor ones, too. If a player gets more than one random targeted debuff — which seems to happen with distressing regularity — and happens to not be at full health when they hit, the player will almost certainly die. If a player happens to get the frozen debuff during Norgannon adds, that player will almost certainly die to the adds. And there are countless other debuff combos that will insta-kill you, all of them the result of random targeting.

Also, as I mentioned, the raid composition heavily influences your chances for success. One that is heavy on melee has almost no chance of killing this boss, and in fact any raid that is not nearly all ranged will have significantly more difficulty than one that is. Classes with shorter defensive cooldowns are at a distinct advantage over ones with, say only 1 or 2 long defensive cooldowns. And druids and DKs are really the classes of choice for their exceptionally efffective cc abilities for the Norgannon adds. Blizz is once again rewarding us for bringing the class, not the player.

When you add all this up, you get a raid boss that seems — more than any other thus far in the game — to require more luck than skill to beat. (Interestingly, in Mythic — so I am told, I do not know it firsthand — the order of adds for this boss is fixed instead of random. Can’t be introducing uncertainty for the professional players, can we now? After all, they are the primary target audience for this game.)

As I said above, we will almost certainly kill this boss within a week or so, and eventually we will outgear it so that we can roflstomp through. But that is not the point. The point is, that while the mechanic design for this boss may have been relatively decent, the RNG implementation of nearly every aspect of that design — along with the cascading effect on raid composition — is terrible.

Most raid teams consider Coven to be the most challenging boss in the raid, harder even than Argus, the final boss, another indication that it is badly implemented. Sorry, but I belong to the camp that still believes the final boss should be the most difficult one…

I have complained before about what I consider to be Legion’s over-reliance on RNG for nearly every aspect of the game. But the introduction of large-scale randomness even in a raid boss seems to be approaching a jump-the-shark point in the game. It is not fun™ to be put in a position in a boss fight where you know either you as a player will die or the raid will wipe and there is nothing you can or could have done to prevent it. You can ignore it to an extent if it is an exceptionally rare occurrence. But when it happens with the frequency it seems to in Coven, it is a worrisome trend. This is not the WoW raid design that drew me to the activity in the first place.

When Legion is in our rear-view mirrors, will we see its RNG pervasiveness as the point where Blizz recognized they had gone too far, or as the jumping-off point for a new genre: the Massively Multiplayer Online Game of Chance?

On that low note, it is time to start the weekend. See you on the other side.

We have had another week of the new raid tier, Antorus the Burning Throne. On Tuesday, Mythic and the first wing of LFR opened. I still have not seen anything to change my initial opinion of it: Great artwork, a few interesting boss mechanics, but not a tier that will wear well enough to last almost a year until the next expansion.

This is an observation, not a complaint: the raid is easier than either Tomb of Sargeras or Nighthold. I say that even though our raid team has only done 4/11 Heroic bosses. Of course, the remaining ones could be impossibly hard on Heroic, but judging by the progress of guilds on my server — which is decidedly not a raiding server — within a couple of weeks there will likely be several guilds that are 11/11 (H). I would venture to say that within a month the top 10-15 guilds on the server will have heroic on farm. Whether they decide to farm it for the raid trinket system or the somewhat puny tier gear is an open question.

My initial concern that the sheer size of the raid would hinder farming seems to have been unfounded. We have some Thursday scheduling problems, so last night instead of continuing with progression on heroic, we did normal with about 20 people. We had no problems completing a full clear in less than our normal 4-hour raid time.

We had fun last night, and it is good to be back into some actual problem-solving raiding again, but I still don’t see this raid holding my interest once we have heroic on farm. For one thing, of course, we are at the end of the expansion, and there is a certain amount of burnout that inevitably takes place. For another, the gear from this raid does not excite me much. Honestly, what is the point of grubbing out every piece of gear you can get when this is the last raid of the expansion?

Blizz buffed a couple of specs’ t21 bonuses this past week, but most of them are still uninspiring. And the special trinket system seems like a self-licking ice cream cone to me: you get it by raiding so that you can be more efficient at raiding. The only reason I can see to keep running this raid is to eventually upgrade the “regular” special trinkets as a back door to being able to equip three legendaries. (Assuming you do not get the one legendary trinket drop from Argus, which I am absolutely certain I will not.) Even that seems a stretch, given that there is not another raid tier to prepare for.

I wonder if, after a few guilds have this raid on farm, that the group emphasis in Legion will shift in a big way to M+. If that is really the only challenge left after Antorus, it seems likely. (And would force some continuing gear farming from the raid, since gear is an important factor for high level M+ runs.) This, of course, creates a bigger esports audience for the next M+ tournament, which in turn fuels Blizz’s emerging game focus. We have a few people in our guild who are hooked on M+, but it is not really my thing. I run one or two a week, mainly to get the weekly chest, but I do not generally enjoy timed activities.

Back to the Antorus raid. I still think the last three bosses are the most fun and engaging. (And I still think the tower defense Eonar is annoying to the max.) Argus especially, with the planned wipe and the smart use of death as a raid weapon, seems to be one of the most innovative bosses Blizz has given us in a while. Even after Blizz up-tuned it earlier this week, it was a fun fight on Normal last night. It definitely requires some raid planning and some decent team coordination, and when that comes together it really is quite satisfying.

Short post today and one with no profound thoughts, but there is lots going on in my real world schedule. See you all on the other side of the weekend.

It’s Friday, it’s been an especially long week, and my brain does not seem particularly focused, so today’s post is just some scattered thoughts on this and that.

Antorus the Burning Throne. Last night our raid team finished up the Normal raid. We had done 7 bosses on Tuesday, and the last 4 we downed certainly did not disappoint, in my opinion. I found the last 2 (Aggramar and of course Argus) to be great fun, they just seemed to be well designed and had some interesting mechanics. And the artwork, especially for Argus, is simply spectacular. Whatever other shortcomings we may eventually complain about for this raid, the visual design will remain, in my opinion, one of the best Blizz has ever done. Do yourselves a huge favor when you first get into the Argus area, and look behind you up into the skybox. It is not only beautiful, but it gives you a sense of the entire story of Legion — even me, who generally has no interest in lore.

And, without revealing any spoilers, the cinematic after you kill Argus is excellent. It rivals, in my opinion, the Battle for Azeroth cinematic we saw at Blizzcon.

We had enough trouble (something like 4-5 wipes) with both Aggramar and Argus that I think they will be quite tough for us on Heroic. As with many of the fights in the raid, there is a definite team learning curve

Overall, from a very limited point of view, it seems to me that very few of this raid’s bosses are even close to friendly to BM hunters. They seem either to involve single-target pew-pewing or a lot of very scattered adds. Several of the fights involve phases with high-priority adds placed all around a room or platform, and I really noticed a drop in my DPS just due to my melee-bound pets taking their time getting to the next target. Even switching to Blink Strikes as a talent did not seem to help much, partly due to the cooldown on that ability, and also to the ambling nature of Hati. Classes with robust DoT abilities and wide cleaves will shine in many fights in this raid.

As to the vaunted Argus trinkets from the final boss, our raid of 20 got 4 drops (not me, I got the useless quest legendary ring along with gold and AP), and none were Aman’Thul’s Vision (The One Trinket That Binds Them All).

Patch 7.3.5. This is up on the PTR for anyone that wants to try it out. I am somewhat disappointed that — at least as far as we know so far — it will not involve any significant class balance fixes, in spite of Blizz’s pronouncement early in Legion that the “dot five” patches would be mainly targeted at class balance changes. Some of the recently-announced changes include:

Patch/Expansion confusion. Honestly, I am kind of losing the bubble on what is happening in Patch 7.3.5 and what is just development for the next expansion. Blizz could probably be a little bit clearer on this. So the following comments may apply to changes coming in the next xpac, or to changes coming in the next patch. Who knows?

Changes to the early leveling experience. Zone scaling is implemented in Azeroth leveling zones, and XP to level is being increased for levels 10-59. I know this is a popular change, but I have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, I like the idea of being able to keep questing in a zone I enjoy, and still continue to advance. On the other hand, I find I generally like pretty much roflstomping through a zone at low levels. I have done these quests so often that they no longer hold much interest for me, and the only really fun is becoming familiar with my alt’s abilities. (And remember, Blizz has taken away a great many class abilities at lower levels, so that many specs go through a lot of levels with only 2-3 major abilities.) I don’t know that having every mob fight take longer is really an improvement.

I also get a kick out of leveling quickly, and I am not sure why Blizz thinks stretching that process out is desirable.

It almost seems like Blizz is enforcing a small part of the “Classic” experience on all of us now.

More backpack space. Okay, this is minor, but remember when Ion Hazzikostas promised us we would be seeing more space in our grubby old original backpacks? Yeah. Turns out, it appears, that the extra space will be tied to having an authentication attached to your account. In principle, I think this is a pretty good idea. Blizz wants to do as much as they can to stop account theft, which in turn makes life harder for illegal botters, gold sellers, and the like. So it’s not a bad idea to offer a little perk to people willing to add this bit of security to their account. (I have had the phone authenticator for years, and it in no way hinders my access to the game or my enjoyment of it. It is not an absolute guarantee that my account cannot be hijacked, but it greatly complicates the process for any hackers. Which means, I think, they would be more likely to go after someone who does not have an authenticator. So please, if you think an authenticator is a bad idea, for my sake continue to have an unprotected account …)

The quibble I have with this is that Blizz is really chintzing out on the offer. Their miserly “gift” is a whopping — get ready for this — FOUR extra bag spaces!

Sheesh.

Upgrading 970 legendaries. This is nothing more than a big Blizz gotcha joke, in my opinion. In the few comments Blizz has made about this annoying and tedious process (it will take many people literally months to upgrade all theirs, even assuming they max out Wakening Essences every day), they have rather smarmily intimated that maybe we should just pick a few legendaries to upgrade and forget about the rest.

Really?

After you handed them out like candy, after you refused to back off the RNG aspect of which ones we could get, after you nerfed the “good” ones so that they are all more or less equal in certain circumstances? After all you have done to encourage us to use all of them depending on the fight and our individual gearing and talents, NOW you say we should just pick a couple and stick with them?

If Blizz is going to stick with the system they have on this, the least they could do is make the Wakening Essences more plentiful. They could ensure we get at least 10 in the emissary chests. They could award them for every world quest we do instead of just emissary ones, or alternately they could award several as the actual WQ reward, like they do with gold or Blood of Sargeras or class hall resources. They could give us a shoulder enchant that awards a few bonus ones periodically as loot.

Even better, Blizz, quit nickel and diming us on this stuff and do like you did in other expansions — when the new numbers hit, auto-upgrade the ones we have. What the hell would it hurt to do that? If you really do want us to switch out these items as situations dictate, then you should upgrade them all so we will actually do that, not encourage us to just stick to the two or three we have managed to grind out upgrades for. Put your money where your mealy mouth is.

And on that note of cranky annoyance, I am off to start my weekend. Enjoy yours.

Well, last night we dipped our collective guild toe into Antorus the Burning Throne. Following our usual approach of running Normal a couple of times before we pare down the raid team and start progression at the Heroic level, last night’s run was Normal and we had 22-23 players for most of the night. In a four hour raid, first time through with many of us hazy on mechanics and positioning, we only had time to down seven bosses and wipe a few times on the eighth. (More on this below.)

My biggest impression so far is, this is a long, muddled raid with no clear theme other than “here’s a whole bunch of bosses to keep you guys occupied for many months”.

Start with the name of the raid. I know this is petty, but in an era of clipped social media speech, this raid name does not in any way lend itself to a shortened reference. I suppose the WoW model would indicate AtBT, but that seems pretty cumbersome. ABT might end up being the acronym of choice, but something about that seems off to me. I was calling it Ant in guild chat last night, and was — weirdly — corrected that we are calling it Anthony or Tony for short. (Yeah, not sure I get it, either.)

The long and rather cumbersome title seems oddly appropriate, though, in light of the fact the raid itself is extremely long — 11 bosses in what seems at first experience to be a very large indoor/outdoor setting that is pretty stunning in terms of its artwork. (When you go in, you really owe it to yourself to take a good look around — the Blizz art team did a great job on this. At one point I looked up at the sky box and actually missed the pull countdown because I was so blown away by the view.)

The various regions of the raid are so diverse (beautiful sunny outdoor unicorn-and-flowers areas juxtaposed with dark rocky fire-and-brimstone platforms and caves) as to make one wonder if the whole raid setting was designed by a rather inattentive committee unwilling to say no to any suggestion. However, I suppose one could also look at it as a tour of the entire planet of Antorus, taking the fight to the Legion generals in every corner of their home world. The raid environment is stunning, but very confusing.

There seems to be no logical path or flow from one area to another. There are places where we had to jump off rocks to get to a boss, some where we had to go through a portal, others where we had to use Vindicaar-style transporters. Dying and running back was easy and quick at times due to rez locations and handy portals, while at other times it seemed needlessly long and annoying. I am sure much of my utter confusion is due to it being my first time in the raid, but I had a very strong impression that it was designed by throwing together a whole bunch of scenarios and then figuring out technical ways to get from one to another.

As to difficulty, I was surprised that we sailed through the first few bosses one-shotting them, and wiped only a couple of times on the rest. Of course, it was Normal. (I think Heroic will be very different.) Our raid average ilevel was something like 936, which is a few ilevels above the average successful kill for this difficulty, so that may have something to do with it. On the other hand, we certainly did not do much prep for it. A few people had watched some videos, one or two had some web site cheat sheets up for reference, but we worked out superficial strategy on the fly. (That’s one of the reasons it took us 4 hours to down 7 bosses — we discussed strategy for several minutes before each one.)

The interest level of the bosses was for me mixed. Some had some fun mechanics, others just came across as dull and tedious. For what it’s worth, we ended up one-shotting the multi-platform Eonar encounter I described in my last post. However, most of us had zero idea what we were doing, and spent most of the fight running/jumping/flying about trying to find where the targets were, responding to someone crying, “Top level! Big add!” or “Middle! Fel Hounds!” Et cetera. Total chaos. I really cannot imagine it on Heroic.

(For context, we one-shotted Garothi, Felhounds, Portal Keeper Hasabel, and Eonar. We wiped once each on Antoran High Command and Imonar, and four times on Kin’garoth. We also wiped 4 times on Varimathras but did not kill him before we called it for the night.)

All in all, though, it was a good raid night and we had a great deal of fun. I do think, however, this raid is a bit too scattered and cumbersome to wear very well — for many guilds it will turn out to be a one and done. It does have the standard quest to get 4 gizmos from a late boss and be able to skip parts of it eventually, so that might turn out to be more useful than it has for other raids. But the sheer immensity of it, combined with the mixed bag of bosses and the rather puny loot tables, will tend to put many guilds off. Perhaps that realization is why Blizz introduced the Antoran trinket grind, which is primarily done by defeating the last raid boss over and over again. A few guilds will consider this reason enough to keep running the raid, but I think the majority will judge it not worth the effort.